The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Business

Dr. Seuss on Uncertain Times and Economic Unrest

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Not unlike many other people I have spent copious amounts of time reading news stories about the economy and what is going on within the U.S. and around the world. If you take the stories at face value then you wind up with a very negative impression of the general state of affairs.

It is not unreasonable to say that these stories are not just sad but depressing. Doom and gloom are what we are being fed.

So I do what I normally do and I cruise through the blogosphere to see what other parties have to say about this. What do bloggers of all political bents think about the reports that are coming from the MSM and what do they think about things in general.

As I tooled on through I remembered a post I had done about Dr. Seuss and his positions on war and politics. And so I decided to go take a look again at the online catalog of his political cartoons.

So many of them are still applicable today. Here are some that caught my eye.



If you have never seen his work I urge you to spend some time sifting through it.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Credit Card Problems- The System is Broken

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In the years since I graduated from college I have grown to be quite wary of late night and early morning telephone calls because invariably they only come when there is a problem. The sole exception that comes to mind are the early morning telephone calls that I received about the birth of nieces and nephews, those were pretty cool and worth losing sleep over.

But aside from those moments the primary association I have with the odd hour telephone call is not positive. They have been notices of death or illness, not good news. So when the phone rang at a little past ten I was instantly on guard. The caller ID was restricted so for a moment I was hesitant to answer it, but then concern got the best of me so I picked it up.

It turned out that a dear friend was on the line and in need of a friendly ear. He made some small talk and then launched into a story about bad his finances are and how he can’t pay his bills. I felt for him. He has a good work ethic and has always worked hard, but during the past few years he has been laid off a few times.

Each time it happened he picked himself up and did his best to go and find a new job. In between he did what he could to support his family. What little savings he had was quickly eaten up and he found himself using the credit cards to try and get by. They didn’t go for fancy meals, vacations or luxury cars.

They were used to purchase groceries, pay tuition for his children, buy clothing for them and other things of this nature. In short, they helped to cover necessities. Gradually he developed balances on them and though he did his best to try to pay them off the odd jobs he worked didn’t pay enough to prevent them from becoming maxed out.

When he called me he was in a panic. He didn’t have enough money to pay all of his bills. He was a week late in paying one of the cards and had received two calls from them asking when they could expect payment.

During the second call he explained his situation to the bank and asked if they could work with him. They gave him two options in which his account would be frozen and he’d be asked to pay a set amount each month to pay off the bill.

He told them he couldn’t afford the amount he was quoted and asked if they could extend the term so that he could pay a lesser amount. The representative told him no and that because he was late in paying his interest rate had been raised to more than 28%.

He reiterated that he wanted to pay them, that he wasn’t trying to shirk his responsibility. He said that if it was a $100 less a month he could afford to make the payments. They turned him down and he asked what he should do.

In turn he was told that if he continued to withold payment the card would go into default and he’d probably gain more options. He told them that he didn’t want that to happen, that he was willing to pay and couldn’t they work with him. And again they apologized, but said that policy was policy.

I could hear the anger and the frustration in his voice. When he told me that they system was broken I had to agree.

When the banks got into trouble they went to the government to receive aid. When he went to the bank asking for them to grant him some assistance he got a poke in the eye and a kick in the pants.

Even better, his tax dollars are part of what is helping to fund the banks bailout.

I have heard and read a lot of comments about how people need to be responsible and that we should let the chips fall where they may. It may sound like a good idea to let things lie, but sometimes you need to be there to give people a hand up.

There are more and more stories about middle class families like my friend who are in serious financial distress. I don’t have the answer, but I think that if we don’t find ways to help we are all going to end up paying the price.

Recommendations on LinkedIn

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At some point I must have written about being overwhelmed by the hordes of social media applications that I am tied into. I have several blogs, a Facebook account, Twitter account, Plaxo and one on LinkedIn.

I rarely do anything with Plaxo and have been relatively uninvolved with LinkedIn, although I think that it is time that I begin to pay more attention to it. If you are not familiar with LinkedIn here is a simple explanation about it:

LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries. You can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals that you need to work with to accomplish your goals.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form enduring connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of qualified professionals and experts.

I should send them a bill for the free publicity.

Anyway, LinkedIn is really a business application and that is how I use it. I don’t play games, no smart remarks, I just put up a profile and let it be. That profile is very important and I am not pleased with how mine appears right now so revising and revamping it is on a long list of things to do.

One of the things that LinkedIn provides is a place in which you can receive or write recommendations. It is a smart idea and many people have taken advantage of this. However, I take some of those recommendations with a grain of salt and here is why.

Some of them are written by friends of the person about whom it is being written. Now this doesn’t mean that they are factually incorrect or that there is anything wrong with them, but it does raise a number of questions.

Lately it has been of particular interest to me because I have received requests for a recommendation from people I have never worked with. I have to question why they would want me to write one for them. What advantage is there, unless they try to dress it up and pretend that we did work together. Or alternatively there is the old trick of writing about some past project in which the two of worked together in some of client/vendor relationship.

Thus far I have declined to write a recommendation for anyone that I haven’t worked for, but I am tempted to make an exception for the next person who asks in which case I am going to have some fun preparing a very interesting recommendation for them.

Pieces of a Larger Puzzle

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One of the joys of parenting is the challenges presented in trying to answer the 1,872,986 questions they kids ask. What happened on August 31, 1968? Why is this street called Hampshire and not Burninglog? Was there really a burning log there? Who was Jack The Ripper and why wasn’t he called Jason?

You get the point, there are just a ton of questions that come at you from every which angle. At times it is a real challenge to try and keep up with them. It is not just because sometimes you are tired and your brain hurts from being used far too much, but that many of these questions aren’t the kind that have simple answers. And even if they do have simple answers, sometimes those don’t suffice.

Since I am a boy trapped in a man’s body I haven’t completely lost the question bug. I very much enjoy learning about lots of different things and trying to figure out how pieces fit into a larger puzzle. That curiosity has served me well, but at times it has been the source of trouble as I have taken more than a couple of things apart to see how they work.

That leads into a conversation I had a number of years ago with some people about what things should really cost. It was one of those moments in which a group of people started ranting about how such and such cost far too much. Since I enjoy these discussions and am sometimes guilty of pushing the envelope I started to debate with them about pricing.

As I recall we began to talk about the cost of office chairs. One of the others said that they thought that the margins must be really big because a chair was nothing more than a frame, some fabric and wheels. I disagreed with them and asked if they had really thought about it.

If you start to break it down you find that the chair is more complex. Someone had to find the metal for the chair. They had to find a way to manufacture the frame. It could involve a mold and machining of parts. They had to find someone to supply the wheels. Sometimes the wheels were made of several parts. Someone had to find the materials for those parts. There could be a mold and machining for those parts. Someone had to find the material for the chair, be it fabric, leather or fake leather.

And of course there is packaging, shipping, storage and a number of other items that are most likely involved here as well. Not to mention the question of how these chairs were being sold. What sort of distribution chain was involved.

I find a lot of that kind of stuff to be interesting. How many different people and places are involved in the manufacturing process. In theory the computer I am using right now could be a global computer with pieces from every corner of the planet.

On a side note if you want to get into trouble tell your high school English teacher that the planet is a sphere and cannot really have four corners. They’ll love you for it.

Ok, me and the U.N. ‘puter are going to move on to the next post.

Crossposted here.

Where’s The Beef- At Arbys

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There was an English teacher at my high school who looked an awful lot like the Where’s The Beef woman in this commercial. Alas, it appears that Wendy’s is going the way of the dinosaurs.

(AP) After two past rejections, the owner of Arby’s shaved roast beef sandwich restaurants is buying Wendy’s, the fast-food chain famous for its made-to-order square hamburgers and chocolate Frosty dessert, for around $2 billion.

Triarc Companies Inc., which is owned by billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, said Thursday it will pay about $2.34 billion in an all-stock deal for the nation’s third-largest hamburger chain started in 1969 by Dave Thomas. Wendy’s had rejected at least two buyout offers from Triarc.

Airlines Continue To Rob The Public

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This morning I was more than a little disturbed to read the following headline in The Los Angeles Times:

Airlines squeeze fliers as profit soars

Having just returned from my most recent business trip in which I and several hundred others were stuffed inside a plane and asked to pay for stale food I was less than pleased to read the following:

The nation’s airlines were late more often this summer, lost more baggage and bumped more passengers off flights than in any summer this decade. They also made more money.

Despite the worst summer ever for air travelers, major airlines posted huge profits as they packed more passengers into fewer and smaller planes.

We pay more and receive less. There is something wrong, very, very wrong with this picture.